What’s next?

Spring Framework 5.0 RC4 has just been released and other Spring projects should follow. Spring Boot 2.0 M4 is just around the corner and this will be a nice way to test the last release candidate of Spring Framework before GA. If you want to take an early look at Spring Boot 2, and we’d love to hear your feedback if you do, please go to start.spring.io and select Spring Boot 2.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT.

What started out as a small, in-house web application that generates Spring Boot projects, grew into something bigger than we expected. You can now use Spring Initializr on the web, in your favorite IDE (Eclipse STS and IntelliJ IDEA) and even with your command-line tools (try curl https://start.spring.io).

In the meantime, the Spring portfolio is growing and we received a lot of useful feedback from the Spring community. Because nothing beats actual data, we’ve improved the service to export its metrics to a centralized redis instance, before the summer. This allows us to keep a reliable set of statistics for a long period of activity (and regardless of the number of instances we deploy on Pivotal Web Services).

One of those new features is the flexible resolution and transformation of static web resources. Spring framework already allows you to serve static resources using ResourceHttpRequestHandlers. This feature gives you more power and new possibilities.

Almost ten years ago Adrian Colyer wrote a memorable blog post, giving the best explanation on aspect oriented programming (AOP) out there: clear and simple style, accurate content, no buzzwords. If you’ve taken a look at the the earlier twoposts in this series, you may have noticed some of our architecture choices in the client module of the Sagan application, including the use of JavaScript modules.

In this post, I want to walk you through the basics of JavaScript modules in the style of Adrian’s post: clear, simple, accurate, no buzzwords!